Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Power consumption by a multicore processor may be reduced by operating the cores at near-threshold voltages. In general, power consumption may be quadratically proportional to supply voltage and linearly proportional to clock frequency. Accordingly, reducing the supply voltage and corresponding clock frequency may reduce power consumption by a significant amount. However, due to manufacturing variations, there may be differences in the threshold voltages and maximum operable frequencies of the various cores of a multicore processor. A similar situation may exist regarding interconnected routers on a multicore processor, which may form components of a network on a chip (“NoC”).